Hi-vis, wet weather and thermal
Hi-vis to EN ISO 20471, and where the work is on or near the line, to the Railway Group Standard RIS-3279-TOM instead. Waterproofs and thermal layers, because a tunnel is wet and cold in July as readily as in January.
ISO 45001 certified — certificate 2101
Workwear and safety equipment for tunnelling and underground work
Underground work is the hardest environment TES supplies into, and the one where the difference between a supplier and a catalogue shows up fastest. Wet, abrasive, poorly lit and confined, a tunnel gets through gloves, footwear and disposable respiratory protection at a rate that surprises anyone specifying from a general construction baseline.
TES supplies workwear, PPE, tools and consumables to tunnelling and underground projects across the UK — and, because most UK tunnelling is rail or highways tunnelling, does so as a RISQS-registered supplier with a FORS Silver accredited delivery fleet.
- ISO 45001 certificate 2101 — occupational health and safety management.
- RISQS-registered supplier, ID 10079, for the rail side of underground work.
- Consumption-rate stocking, not one-off issue: call-off, vending or a managed store.
What we supply into tunnelling
The categories below are the ones underground work consumes differently from surface work — higher volume, shorter life, and specified against a harsher duty.
Respiratory protection
Disposable and reusable respiratory protection from 3M. Dust and silica exposure is the health case that drives most of the underground PPE schedule, and it is a genuine consumable — a resupply cadence, not a purchase.
Head, eye and hearing
Safety helmets, Bollé and Uvex eye protection and hearing protection selected to work together under a hood and with a respirator. Confined, noisy, low-light work is where badly matched PPE gets quietly removed.
Hand and foot protection
Cut, impact and grip gloves to EN 388, and Rockfall and Roots footwear to EN ISO 20345 — including waterproof and penetration-resistant options for standing water and cut ground.
Tools, fixings and fasteners
Bahco, Knipex, Facom and Stanley hand tools; DeWalt, Makita, Milwaukee and Bosch power tools; fixings and fasteners from stock, with non-standard items sourced through TES bespoke components.
Consumables, welfare and hygiene
Abrasives, tapes, sealants, marking and general consumables, plus welfare and hygiene supplies including SC Johnson professional ranges — which matter more underground, where washing facilities are a walk away.
Consumption, not procurement, is the tunnelling supply problem
On a tunnelling job the PPE budget is rarely wrong because the unit prices were wrong. It is wrong because consumption was estimated from surface work. Gloves and disposable respirators go two to three times as fast, footwear has a shorter life, and demand is lumpy — it follows the shift pattern and the ground conditions, not a monthly average.
That makes the mechanism matter more than the catalogue:
- TES Vending — issue control at the portal rather than in a site office, with usage data by individual, team or cost centre. On high-consumption items it is the difference between knowing what was used and knowing what was ordered.
- Stores management — a site store run as a managed service, with min/max levels set against real consumption rather than the original schedule.
- Delivery on TES vehicles — FORS Silver accredited fleet, ID 001657, locally, with courier and pallet networks nationwide.
The accreditations behind it
ISO 45001 — certificate 2101, issued by AUVA — is the one worth naming first on this page. It certifies occupational health and safety management, which is exactly the question a tunnelling principal contractor is asking of anyone whose people come on site.
Alongside it: ISO 9001, certificate 1214, first achieved on 8 March 2000 and held continuously since; ISO 14001, certificate 2100; and BSIF Registered Safety Supplier status since August 2024, under which registered members undertake to supply PPE that genuinely meets the standard it is sold against. All three ISO certifications are issued by AUVA, a UKAS-accredited certification body — a distinction that pre-qualification systems draw deliberately.
For the rail portion of underground work, TES is a RISQS-registered supplier, ID 10079, registered in January 2024. Full certificate numbers are on the about page.
Tunnelling projects we have supplied
Named schemes, not named clients. Each date given is the project’s own build timeline, not a statement about how long TES was supplying it.
- Thames Tideway — London’s 25 km “super sewer”, running as deep as 70 m beneath the river. Built from 2016, with main construction completed in 2024 and the system fully connected in February 2025.
- Tideway West — the western section of the same scheme, from Acton to Wandsworth, awarded in 2015 with tunnelling under way from 2019.
- Silvertown Tunnel — the Riverlinx road tunnel under the Thames. Built from 2021 and opened in April 2025, London’s first new under-river road crossing in more than thirty years.
- Crossrail — the twin bored tunnels beneath central London that became the Elizabeth line. Built from 2009, opened May 2022.
- Bank and Elephant & Castle station upgrades — new running and passenger tunnels driven alongside live Underground stations. Bank completed February 2023; Elephant & Castle ongoing, with its passenger tunnels due to complete in 2027.
Between them those cover most of what makes underground supply its own discipline: deep bored tunnel, shaft and portal work, and confined station work a few metres from a railway that never closes.
Related sectors
- Rail infrastructure and renewals — where most UK tunnelling work sits.
- Road and highways maintenance — the surface half of an urban tunnelling job.
- All six sectors TES supplies
Specifying PPE for an underground job?
Send us the schedule and the expected headcount and shift pattern, and we will come back on specification, realistic consumption rates and how resupply would run.